Bible Commentaries

The Burden of Habakkuk

Habakkuk 1:1).

This is the way of the Bible. It is the way of personal testimony. It is the way of individual experience. Habakkuk has not come to comment upon himself, but to tell us what he himself "did see." If prophets and preachers and teachers would do this the world would soon be religiously awakened. What are we apt to do? To deal in photographs. Here is a photograph of what our fathers believed three hundred years ago. What have I to do with that? I look at it, form an opinion about it, and ask about the life of this day. You do not like your own old photographs. You were pleased with them at the time when they were taken, and you generously gave some of them away to your friends, and now you scarcely identify them, and you beg your friends to allow you to replace them with something better. Yet you have photographed the creed of three hundred years ago, and you worship it like a fetish. Why do you not tell us what you have seen, what you feel? We do not want the photograph of the man as he was when he was a child, we want him to-day, his own personality, to stand before us and talk to us the language of the day, and delight us with the recital of his immediate consciousness of God and experience of life. This is the genius of the Bible. We do not find that the men rise up with great anxiety to conform themselves to lines which somebody else laid down a thousand years before; the prophets, man after Habakkuk 1:6-7).

See what they do in Habakkuk 1:9 and Habakkuk 1:10 :—

"They shall come all for violence: their faces shall sup up as the east wind, and they shall gather the captivity as the sand. And they shall scoff at the kings, and the princes shall be a scorn unto them: they shall deride every strong hold; for they shall heap dust, and take it."

God raises up the enemy; Gods sends the pestilence; God tells the wolf to go out and bite the flock; God fills the air with destruction. He is not afraid to say so. All this means that we are governed upon central principles, that conduct is the touchstone, and that by our life we make the world what it is even from the divine standpoint. Blessed be God for opposition. We are made by conflict; we are chastened and perfected by depletion and sorrow. Thank God for all the unanswered questions in the mind. There are those who would have no questions unanswered. What a world it would be to live in if there were no interrogatories that lay beyond our imagination. Questions—serious, profound, practical—are as the shore-line; they mark the termination of the land. We would have them answered, and we can only answer them by drowning ourselves in the great ocean. Questions are inspirations; questions are humiliations; questions are invitations. We should die without questions—hard questions, insoluble, obstinate, mocking questions; they keep us at the right point, subdue us into the right spiritual condition, and yet promise us that by-and-by all that is necessary for us to know shall be revealed. We shall have questions under our review, when our time is no longer broken up by sin and pain and sorrow and night; for in the higher school there is no night, it is all working time, and as for sorrow and sighing, they will have fled away. When we ask God to account for the mysteries of his providence he turns away from us as we would turn away from impertinent inquirers. Life is so made, account for it as we may, that it can only be developed, strengthened, chastened, purified, perfected by daily suffering.

How does Habakkuk get rest? He gets rest by a right view of God:—"Art thou not from everlasting?" The very word soothes and comforts the troubled soul. Given a life seventy years long, and oh the trouble, the disquiet, the discomfort, the unrest, the questioning, the practical atheism; but given a conception of eternity, and the billows roll themselves into harmonic peace, and become elements of controlled strength. What time we are afraid we should hide ourselves in the years of the Most High. When we think everything is going to ruin we should invoke the genius of eternity. This brings us to an illustration often employed, but always useful. The earth lies on one side within the limits of geography, on the other it enters into the mystery of astronomy. As a measurable globe it is full of inequalities; it has great warts upon its face called mountains, it has great delvings in its side called valleys, it is punctured with immense caves. Nothing can be more irregular than the surface of the earth; but taken up into astronomic motion, where are the great mountains, caverns, valleys, inequalities? Where are they? Lost, when the world is swung like a censer around the central fire. So it is with us. What mountainous difficulties we have, what cavernous troubles, what beatings of the sea upon our little shore, what shakings of the hills! That is the geographical view: but caught up in the wider gravitation, and made part of a grand solar system, inequalities there are none, velocity smooths them all out, and the higher relations settle into unity and beauty and music, things that were aberrant, eccentric, and unmanageable. Blessed God, so it shall be in the winding up of all this little scheme of things. We talk of Chaldeans, invasions, wars, troubles, commotions, earthquakes, pestilences,—forgive the babble of thy nursery children. When we are men, and clothed with light, we shall look down upon this elementary criticism as almost bordering upon profanity; but we shall recover ourselves, and say, In the days of our ignorance God winked at our folly, but now in the days of our manhood we will say, He hath done all things well.

Prayer

Holt, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, heaven and earth are full of thy glory. Who is holy as the Lord? The heavens are not clean in thy sight, nor are the angels guiltless of folly. Yet hast thou said unto us by thy Son , Be ye holy, as your Father in heaven is holy. Who can attain? who can apprehend? We are dust and ashes; we are a wind that cometh for a little time and passeth away: how can we be perfect with the perfectness of God? But thou hast sent unto us thy Holy Spirit that he may take of the things of Christ and show them unto us, that he may dwell in us, that he may sanctify us wholly, body, soul, and spirit, and make us beautiful as a palace built for God. The blood of Jesus Christ thy Son cleanseth from all sin: by that blood we become a holy Church, without spot, or wrinkle, or any such thing; glorious Church. Help us daily in this upward direction; strengthen every good resolve; help us to resist every temptation; may we know the enemy, his wiles, his persistence, his strength. Comfort us with the assurance that he that is with us is more than all that can be against us: thus may our courage be sustained, thus may we be saved from despair. Teach us that growth is imperceptible, assure us that we may be growing in grace without ourselves fully knowing it; may we cling the more closely to Christ because of our weakness, may we tarry within the shadow of the Cross. Save us from ourselves, from trust in our own power, which is as a cloud driven by the wind; lead us to repose completest faith upon God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost. Encourage us; let some beam of sunshine fall upon the loneliest path; let some word or tone of music come to the addest heart. May the weakest soul say, in the power of the Holy Ghost, hat from this moment he will be better. The Lord hear the oath, and seal it in heaven. Amen.